Many business owners and their management team have the dream of going global; reaching a world wide audience, global brand recognition, and of course, the sales that come with a multi-national audience. But while dreaming big is important and global dominance is only a click away, there is an obvious question that tends to escape strategic planning: are you capturing your local search market?
Local search is a great – and overlooked- method to boost your site’s traffic and search rankings. Not only is it effective, but search engines like google, yahoo, bing, and Ask.com encourage local search and thus make it relatively simple (with sound strategy and good old fashioned know-how) to rank on the local search market.
Basically, local search is based on geolocation: the process by which search engines figure out where a computer is geographically. The more you make your website findable for local search terms, the more search engines will match you with the those local searchers.
For example, let’s say that you sell digital cameras from your store in Newark NJ and you have a website where you try to generate national, or even global, sales. Now, digital cameras is very competitive search term and you have a new site (or you’re new to optimizing your site) so there is very little chance that your site will be found when someone searches for “digital cameras.”
However, as you’re developing your ability to rank for highly competitive terms, becoming findable for more specific terms is much more doable for both the short and the long term. Here is where local search comes in. Ranking for the term “Digital Cameras Newark NJ” is an effective way to be found and generate sales (maybe to earn back the cash you just spent on that beautiful brand spanking new site).
We’ve only touched on a few points here about local search and we’ll develop more ideas and insights in later articles. But, here is the important point to remember: people often add location names with their keyword searches. Now ask yourself: is your site optimized for local search? Are you registered with search engines for your local predicts and services? If not, maybe it is time to go local.
